I’m happy to announce a new resource for companies with 100-1,000 employees: the Cisco Midsize Business Solutions website. Built for midsize IT and business leaders, it discusses current market influences and top challenges with insights on how to address them. With solutions, case studies, videos, and tools, it provides these leaders with the information they need to grow their business.

One of the top focus areas on the website is the infrastructure. A strong IT infrastructure is important to the success of any business. The infrastructure is how we get the applications we need to do our jobs. It’s how we collaborate with our co-workers, partners, and customers. It’s how we access the data we need when and where we need it. When it comes to midsized businesses, it’s the key to growth. Read More »

Welcome to the Cisco Sizzle! Each month, we’re rounding up the best of the best from across our social media channels for your reading pleasure. From the most read blog posts to the top engaging content on Facebook or LinkedIn, catch up on things you might have missed, or on the articles you just want to see again, all in one place.

Let’s take a look back at the top content from May…

Work-Life Balance … Or Work-Life Integration?Achieving a work-life balance can be tough, but Cisco’s CTO Padmasree Warrior takes a different approach. Instead of trying to balance the demands of work and home separately, she embraces integration and combines the two together whenever she can.

IoE: Powering Supply Chain ManagementCisco is connecting the Internet of Everything to get supply chains perfectly linked. Watch this video to explore how IoE instigates meaningful actions to happen faster.

Cisco Ranks High With Young ProfessionalsCareer Bliss recently compiled a list of the top 10 companies where young employees are happiest, based on more than 48,000 employee-generated reviews. It’s no surprise to us – Cisco was ranked as #5 overall! Many thanks to our employees for this honor – you make us happy, too!

How Organized is Your Cabling?Any IT guru will agree: this is an amazing feat of organization. Extra credit to anyone who can keep cabling in line like this!

What Keeps a CEO Up At Night?In this latest installment of Leadership@Cisco, Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers talks about his love for adventure, the importance of family and the characteristics that make a good leader. Learn what he’s most passionate about, where he sees technology going in the future and what keeps him up at night in this video.

Cloud Curious?Cloud computing is fundamentally changing the way businesses and people consume information. It is enabling IT as a service, evolving collaboration and changing content delivery. See for yourself how Cisco is helping service providers of all sizes navigate the world of many clouds:

Coordinated Attacks Against the U.S. Government and Banking InfrastructureIn this blog post, Mike Schiffman and other Cisco employees inform us of a round of planned cyber attacks that have been launched against the U.S. government and banking systems. They provide an overview of the situation along with resources and best practices to prevent and respond to the attacks. For more information on how to protect against these attacks, don’t miss this post:

Cisco Prime Infrastructure is a network management tool that helps accelerate the rollout of new services. It also provides highly secure access and management of mobile devices, making bring- your-own-device (BYOD) access a reality for corporate IT. Tightly coupling client awareness with application performance visibility and network control, Cisco Prime Infrastructure helps ensure an uncompromised end-user experience. Deep integration with the Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) further extends this visibility across security and policy-related problems. It presents a complete view of client access issues with a clear path to solving them.

Whether you are well-versed with Prime Infrastructure and want a sneak peek at Prime Infrastructure 2.0 (yes, 2.0) OR you’re new to Cisco’s network management suite and just want to feel out the options, join us at our webinar June 5th (Click to Register) to learn about how Unified Access streamlines converged user access management. We have lined up an early preview of the latest Cisco Prime Infrastructure that we’ll showcase in action with a live demonstration. Read More »

Is broadband deployment progressing or regressing? Does it seem like broadband policy may be taking two steps forward and one step back? Most of the time we’re inundated in encouraging news, both forecasts about its economic potential and grounded-in-reality reports about new deployments, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Research firm Gartner has devised an unintentionally humorous curve that it applies to technology like broadband: its hype cycle. It has five data points, starting out like a waveform and then flattening out.

In the midst of tremendous disruption, it is impossible to tell where the global media industry is ultimately heading. But a recent analysis from the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) explores four possible future scenarios for the media industry. While they do not “predict” the future, the scenarios help build our understanding of possible outcomes — and how various industry players could be affected.

The Shape of Things To Come: Four Scenarios

We explored the ways certain industry developments could swing future outcomes. Combining these drivers into logical groupings (consumer behavior, regulatory requirements, technology, and macroeconomic conditions), we were able to define the following four scenarios, as shown in Figure 1. These scenarios are differentiated by consumer demand, industry structure, and content supply:

Survival of the Fittest — low demand, fragmented industry, and high content supply

Golden Age of Content — high demand, consolidated industry, and controlled content supply

Wonderland — high demand, fragmented industry, and high content supply

Obviously, each of the scenarios will have different winners and losers. The financial impact and the implications for players across the industry value chain will substantially change by scenario. And in each scenario, distributors and infrastructure providers will need to consider different types of investments. Consequently, each type of player will need to adapt its competitive responses to the future scenario taking shape.

Figure 1. Four Future Scenarios Are Based on Various Groupings of Industry Drivers.

Source: Cisco IBSG, 2013

Following are examples of how two future scenarios could play out: Read More »

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